Ratni Bhagtan, Puran and Bhanwari, Zenana Performers

Some portraits of Mughal ladies recently acquired by the British Library. This appeared as a British Library blog - see Posts.

"The Theory and Practice of the Performing Arts in Ancient India" , 2020

This essay looks at the evolution of "nrtta" (graceful physical movement), "nrttya" (graceful movement and expressions) and "natya" (acting, dancing, singing) and their close interfaces with sculpture and architecture in ancient India (1500B.C.E--800C.E). According to Kapila Vatsayayan in the "Square and the Circle of the Indian Arts", the fundamental rituals of the Rig Veda were inherently dramatic as they involved movement and the utterance of sonorous sounds. Bharata's "Natyashastra" ( 2 B.C.E- 2 C.E) a prodigious compendium of the various rituals of performance, its techniques and manifestations lays out what he designates as "natyadharmi", a term later picked up and used by theatre director and anthropologist Eugenio Barba to mean the specialized world of an actor's training and performance. It is opposed to "lokdharma" which is the stuff of life from which theatre or "natya" emanates.The essay takes the reader through the nine rasas (quintessential emotions), 49 bhavas (feelings), the sahrdaya (ideal spectator), the various kinds of "abhinaya" or acting (sattvika, vacika, angika, aharya), "vrittis" (mental attitudes) and "pavrittis" (local colour), various kinds of auditoriums, themes of "natya", and most importantly the operation of rasa as aesthetic principle. Abhinavagupta is one of the key theoreticians referred to in this essay. The essay also looks at the development of Bharatnatyam from Bharat Natya, from the 1000 C.E. in the great temples of South India, principally, Tanjore (Brihadeshvara). The court of the Naik rulers of Tanjore in the 16th and 17th centuries, provided strong encouragement to artists, principally dancers, to develop their talents. As E. Krishna Iyer posits in "Rasa and Bhava in Bharat Natya", Kshetrayya, a court poet for the Naik rulers in the 17th century, wrote many beautiful padas (poems, songs) for Bharatnatyam, which performed by the devadasis or the temple dancers, reached great heights of artistic fulfillment during this time. The essay also looks at the evolution of Indian classical music from its origins in the Samagaan (Vedic period) and the music of the Gandharvas, through "Jati" and "Graam" ragas to its final form of fruition in both North and South Indian classical music traditions.

Archipel 88, pp. 13–70., 2014

On the basis of evidence gathered from Old Javanese textual sources and Central Javanese temple reliefs, I proposed to identify some figures of itinerant ascetics-cum-performers—the vidus—as localised Javanese counterparts of Indic prototypes, namely low-status, antinomian Śaiva practitioners (Acri 2011). Building on the work of Stutterheim, Becker, and Coldiron, here I take up additional textual, art historical, and ethnographic evidence from Java and Bali that suggests a premodern, and ultimately Indic, origin of some performances and their specific performers—viz. the ancient Javanese pirus, the modern Javanese canthang balung and talèdhèk, and the contemporary Balinese topeng Sidha Karya. In pinpointing certain striking analogies between Śaiva traditions of itinerant practitioners known from the Indian Subcontinent and their hypothesised Archipelagic ‘relatives’, I aim to ‘historicize’ those figures, and trace their origins to related figures and milieux—at once performative, ritual, and/or ascetic—known from the Sanskritic tradition. Having briefly discussed the philosophical and/or ritual rationale underpinning many of the performances presented here, I will venture to sketch the socio-cultural factors that affected their Javanese and Balinese performers, who adapted to changing circumstances and external influences (e.g. Islamization and/or Western ‘modernization’) by adopting new modes of engagement with audiences, patrons, and prevalent religious and/or ritual fashions.

Mahratta Vol I Issue I, 2022

Kashmir is known for its great contribution to Sanskrit literature. Given the scholastic tradition associated with the Nāṭyaśāstra, Kashmir was also one of the significant centres of performing arts. These pieces of exquisite letters contain enormous information about the facets related to the culture of the valley. Kuṭṭanimata, a poem written by Dāmodaraguptain in the late 8th century AD is one of them. The objective of this paper is to understand the performing arts of Kashmir as mirrored in the Kuṭṭanimata.

Cracow Indological Studies Vol 20 No 1 (2018): Theatrical and Ritual Boundaries in South Asia. Part II , 2018

Much ink has been spilt on the status and rôles of the Devadāsī in pre- modern times, but some Sanskrit works that contain potentially useful nuggets of information have until now, for various reasons, been neglected. To cite one instance, some scholars have drawn passages about dancers from an edition of what purports to be a Śaiva scripture called the Kāmikāgama. In 1990 however, Hélène Brunner denounced that ‘scripture’, as a late-19th-century forgery concocted for the purpose of winning a legal case, and thereby called into question the value of the text as evidence for much of what it had to say about, for instance, the initiation of dancers in pre-modern times. Meanwhile, hiding, so to speak, in plain view, passages from a rather older Kāmikāgama, one that has been published by the South Indian Archaka Association and that appears to survive in many South Indian manuscripts, actually also contain information about the status of Rudragaṇikās in medieval times. But these seem not to have been examined to date by historians of dance and dancers. The purpose of this paper is to draw into the debate some hitherto unnoticed passages of relevance that are to be found in pre-modern Sanskrit texts.

In Kavita Singh, ed. Scent Upon a Southern Breeze: The Synaesthetic Arts of the Deccan (Marg, 2018), pp. 68–87. * > * > * . The relationship between rāgmālā paintings and their melodic inspiration, the rāgs, remains unclear to date, despite scholars having expended a great deal of energy on the question. From the beginning, rāgmālā paintings were often framed with verses evoking the rāg icons, but generally speaking they floated free from the music-theoretical tradition embodied in written treatises. For their part, Sanskrit, Persian, and vernacular music treatises were overwhelmingly concerned with the sonic properties of rāgs. Even when they did incorporate rāgmālā descriptions, they were apparently never intended to be illustrated visually. There were, however, a small number of exceptions to this rule, in which large-scale music treatises extensively incorporated painted illustrations. Most of the early examples, 16–17C, were associated with the Deccan. In this chapter I focus on one major treatise, Shaikh ‘Abdul Karim’s Javāhir al-Mūsīqāt-i Muḥammadī, written in Persian for Muhammad ‘Adil Shah of Bijapur (r. 1627–56) but incorporating large portions of an illustrated Dakhni music treatise composed c. 1570 probably for ‘Ali ‘Adil Shah. I then place it in dialogue with the famed Chester Beatty Nujūm al-‘Ulūm, whose paintings have been used to date the Javāhir. When read together I argue that these two manuscripts reveal the key to the link between painted and sounded renditions of the rāg—affective and supernatural power, articulated through a blend of Shaivite tantrism, Sanskrit rasa theory, and Islamicate techniques for crafting a balanced emotional self including Unani medicine and astrology. Throughout, I reflect on the complex interrelationships between music, art, and affective power in early-modern Islamicate India, especially in the Deccan and the Mughal empire.

Description of two sculptures, from Nagarjunakonda and from Rajasthan

IRA International Journal of Education and Multidisciplinary Studies, 2016

I n ancient India theatrical performances were the main attractions for the people. Literary evidences prove that ancient Indian theatre is a comprehensive one and is a very popular for entertainment. Cultural arts like dancing, singing, puppet shows etc. were formulated and enacted from pre-Vedic period onwards. Historically, the origin of dance as a form of entertainment can be traced in the Indus valley period. The findings of archeological excavations from Mohenjo-Daro suggest that dance was very much popular in those days. ‘Some of the earliest representations of scenes of dancing occur in cave paintings found in Mesolithic rock shelters. Subsequently, finds of sculpture and representations on seals from Harappan civilization (c. 2700- 1800 BCE) have been taken to represent dancers.’ [i] The posture of grey slate figure of a male dancer from Harappa reminds of tāṇḍava and supports the affinity between the male deity of Harappan culture and later Śiva. It seems that Indus people...

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia, 2011